AMD releases Catalyst 10.7 driver

AMD's software engineers have finally revealed the fruit of this month's labour on the Catalyst driver, releasing version 10.7 to the masses.

At the top of the list of enhancements is a collection of fixes for multi-display set-ups. Using ATI's EyeFinity technology, which can spread the display over three monitors, the new driver now takes user-defined bezel compensation into account when you maximise a windows across more than one monitor.

The new Catalyst suite also has a handy feature to stop you losing the title bar of windows if you drag them to another display. The new driver automatically moves the window if it looks as though you're going to lose your title bar meaning you can move it into the right place on the display without any hassle.

On top of this, AMD also says Catalyst 10.7 ensures that Windows dialogue boxes won't be split across different monitors, or hidden behind bezels, and can instead be set to only appear on the primary display.

From multi-monitors to multi-GPUs, the new driver package also introduces an interesting new CrossFire feature, enabling gamers to play games on rotated displays in portrait mode. This new feature apparently works on single-monitor and EyeFinity setups.

There's some good news for Radeon owners who use the open source media player VLC as well. AMD has now enabled GPU acceleration for H.264 video in version 1.1.1 of the multi-codec software package. This feature is available on Radeon HD 4000 and 5000-series cards.

The driver comes with the usual array of fixes too. According to AMD, the ATI Stream (CAL) test now doesn't exit with an exception error when you're using CrossFire, and you also shouldn't see the "Desktop Window Manager has stopped working" error after you've installed your driver.

Of course, there are still a few bugs still festering, including corruption in Doom 3 and Quake 4 when using Radeon HD 4700-series cards with Windows Vista. You can see the full list of fixes and known issues in the release notes.

Catalyst 10.7 is available now for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Vista and XP.